Brain-Inspired Active Learning Architecture for Procedural Knowledge Understanding Based on Human-Robot Interaction

Improving robots with self-learning ability is one of the critical challenges for the researchers in the area of cognitive robotics and artificial general intelligence. This robot will decide when, where, and what to learn in a continuous visual environment by itself. Here we focus on the procedural knowledge learning, which is sequential and considered harder to understand compared with declarative knowledge in the cognitive system. Inspired by the architecture of the human brain which has integrated well different kinds of cognitive functions, a Brain-inspired Active Learning Architecture (BALA) is proposed for procedural knowledge understanding based on Baxter robot and human interaction. The BALA model contains four main parts: inspired by Primary Visual Pathway, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is constructed for spatial information abstraction; inspired by the Hippocampus Pathway (especially the recurrent loops in CA3 sub-region), a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is built for sequential information processing related with procedural knowledge; inspired by the Prefrontal Cortex, a Knowledge Graph based on Bag Of Words (BOW) is constructed for declarative knowledge generation and association; inspired by the Basal Ganglia Pathway, we select Q matrix for Reinforcement Learning (RL). The CNN and RNN parts will be firstly pre-trained on ImageNet dataset and standard Youtube Video-Scene dataset respectively. Then, the RNN, Knowledge Graph, and Q matrix will be dynamically updated in the Baxter robot’s interactive learning procedure with human cooperators. The BALA could actively and incrementally recognize different kinds of procedural knowledge. In 22-type daily-life videos with procedure knowledge (e.g., opening the door, wiping the table, or taking the phone), the BALA model gets the best performance compared with standard CNN, RNN, RL, and other integrative methods. The BALA model is a small step on integrative intelligence interaction between the Baxter robot and human cooperator.